Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#341

Post by ehnto » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

comboy wrote: post #80

rkho wrote: post #63

Reddit is an intentionally designed dopamine machine with some areas of usefulness. There are pockets of great, high signal communities on Reddit that have not been unbundled. Discovery, however, is a mess. Some examples of some great subs: - HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice - Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey - Posture for, well, fixing my posture I've also bought and sold various digital and phy…

Reddit is a company that made people moderate their content for free. You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.

Yet they totally borked the discovery experience through search. Now you search, click a reddit link, it takes you to half a page with two comments and you have to click a new link to see the whole thing, that is after fighting away the Install the App prompt of course.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#342

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

rkho wrote: post #63

Reddit is an intentionally designed dopamine machine with some areas of usefulness. There are pockets of great, high signal communities on Reddit that have not been unbundled. Discovery, however, is a mess. Some examples of some great subs: - HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice - Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey - Posture for, well, fixing my posture I've also bought and sold various digital and phy…

Social media platforms were never built for constructive debates, Social currencies incentivizes majoritarian opinions.

If you hold a minority view and want it to be acknowledged then moving on to a platform where your view is the majoritarian opinion is the only option, Reddit facilitates it with its Subreddits.

Love Elon Musk? go to r/elonmusk

Hate Elon Musk? go to r/EnoughMuskSpam

Other social media have groups, forums and what not; Yet each subreddit is a platform by itself, tightly knit community, privileges & tools for moderation.

Mobile app has enabled those who are from other social media platforms, those who would have never used old.reddit.com to try it out, accelerated by recent string of high profile news involving reddit.

It would be interesting to watch how reddit balances its philosophy with advertiser's interests.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#343

Post by beervirus » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

lolive wrote: post #284

I have never used Reddit ever (nor Usenet). Anyway I have discovered Reddit while searching for i3 faq and help. (i3=the window manager). They simply use Reddit as their stackOverflow/support forum. Tell me Reddit is the Usenet+StackOverflow of everything and the rest, and I create an account RIGHT NOW!!!

Don’t bother.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#344

Post by Applejinx » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

bad_username wrote: post #192

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #18

Congrats to them big time. It seriously doesn't get the recognition it deserves as the most impactful social media platform. To me, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media today is less about connecting people and really about driving targeted and calculated impressions of X to audiences via a user's feed. This is astro-turfed to feel organic and botted to death by everyone because of how much influence it…

> what I find awesome about reddit is its ability to connect people and really have group conversations I am a redditor for 7 years and that was true early on. Today it is not. You can connect and have group conversations only if you subscribe to a certain dominant political and cultural narrative, walk on egg shells, and toe a line. If you don't, you are swiftly downvoted and banned. There is no escape from this eve…

Pretty sure you've got some opinions that are also being pushed by massive, coordinated troll farms. What you're seeing is the scale of the exercise.

Maybe that tells you something about your political opinions and the nature of the folks you share them with. This sort of thing doesn't just randomly happen. If you're getting clobbered for an offhand remark, it's not about you, it's because there were 10,000 bots and trolls there before you automatedly saying the same stuff to make it seem like 'everybody is saying it'.

Then you turn up, and bam: they don't even think you're real, because you're saying the stuff a thousand bots were saying. Hard luck: I don't think there's a good answer for you, the ground is sort of salted at this point.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#345

Post by JohnJamesRambo » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #123

mtgentry wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve wondered about this. Can you tell when it’s a marketer?

Perfect example I found the other day... the main post is clearly a bot, and all the replies are bots pretending to be users too. Reddit USED to be amazing for finding recommendations for products/services but these days it’s just another bot-filled and paid-content dumping ground like the Google search results. https://www.reddit.com/user/amily95/comments/fkm1rn/how_to_c...

Uncanny valley all the way down.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#346

Post by kraemate » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

kraemate wrote: post #141

So, do its main revenue generators (i.e., users) get a share of the profits?

Sorry, why is this downvoted? There is a serious argument to be had about the source of income for surveillance and tracking driven websites. If the oft-used line of "users being products" is true, then where's our profit?

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#347

Post by bibinou » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

theNJR wrote: post #107

Kevin Rose had a pretty epic Tweet about wanting to buy Digg and bring it back to its pre-redesign phase [1]. Mark Cuban wanted in on it and I seem to remember Alexis Ohanian responded in a new tweet. I don’t feel like going through his old posts to link to it. I’d love a return to the old. Even if its just the social web version of reruns. [1] https://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/1347747289511563265?s=2...

Digg was being astroturfed like hell, that's one of the reasons they wanted to redesign. Doubt it would fare well today.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#348

Post by thrav » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

tommit wrote: post #290

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promote buying more "wholesome" awards to cancer related posts I guess. Are they selling an ad free experience yet? I'm sure they'll shut down the APIs allowing third party clients (like Apollo) soon, like Twitter did.

I know they won't care in the big picture, but if they actually do shut down the 3rd party APIs that will conclude my 10 year journey on reddit.

Good luck extricating it from your life. There’s too much utility. I’ve even come back around to Twitter after being off for 5 years. Tremendous value in having a curated list there.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#349

Post by consumer451 » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #231

paulmendoza wrote: post #93

Stop raising money. Each time you do that you increase the pressure on the site to make more money to earn the valuation. If the company is valued at $6B today then it probably needs to get to at least $18B valuation in two years. How? By trying to extract even more money from the users.

Promote buying more "wholesome" awards to cancer related posts I guess. Are they selling an ad free experience yet? I'm sure they'll shut down the APIs allowing third party clients (like Apollo) soon, like Twitter did.

> I'm sure they'll shut down the APIs allowing third party clients (like Apollo) soon

I have been nervously awaiting this day as well, but I just realized something in the context of HN.

Say reddit kicked off Apollo and all the apps... What an opportunity to make a reddit API clone & then site! Apollo alone has many loving users, some of whom would go with Christian to a new backend. Maybe all the apps would agree on one to migrate to? I wonder if this is already part of reddit's calculus when considering kicking the 3rd parties.

Re: Reddit valued at $6B on a $250M round

#350

Post by leereeves » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

TomSwirly wrote: post #305

leereeves wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say my citation is r/popular itself, but it looks like there's less of it now that the election is over. During the election it was disgusting. The toxic content is still there though, like a LeopardsAteMyFace post crowing about the death of Ron Wright, and as if to prove my point: "This thread has been locked due to extremely toxic and rude comments." Such as the current top comment "...I'm really pas…

> crowing about the death of Ron Wright This man spent the last few months of his life fighting against any medical, scientific response to COVID, claiming that it was a hoax. Half a million Americans are dead - and they died in a truly horrible fashion. What exactly do you expect the response to be?

> claiming that it was a hoax.

Did he? I found nothing on either Google or Duck for "ron wright hoax".

I know some Republicans said that, but by no means every one.